reading someone's dissertation

I don't usually do it (unless I'm on the committee), but I read this weekend an entry in Routledge's "Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory: Outstanding Dissertations" series. Adam McKible wrote THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, LITTLE MAGAZINES, AND NEW YORK as his dissertation at North Carolina, and it's a solid piece of work, although certainly not one that'll hold much interest to a general audience. It combines literary close reading and social history, looking at how four important New York little magazines wrote about the Russian Revolution. It's solid, although I find myself less and less interested in close reading and wishing that McKible had done a little more reception study. That is, if he's going to make an argument about how these little magazines put across an argument about what 1917 meant to their little audiences, I'm only partially interested in what those magazines said. I'm also interested in what the audiences GOT from their magazines. Who read these magazines? THE MESSENGER certainly had a smaller circulation than THE DIAL; how much smaller? Did their audiences overlap? How did the audiences talk back, in letters to the editor? It's one thing to close-read a text, and McKible does this admirably and with a great degree of insight and sophistication. But what effect did that text have on its audience? I'd like to see more discussion of this (although it is, admittedly, very difficult: how can one quantify that?).